Published: January 31, 2007

It’s perched above the Hudson like a rickety Irish time capsule — a country store and pub where there’s coffee and doughnuts for commuters every morning, Bud and Guinness for the bar crowd every night, live Irish music the first Thursday after every full moon and small revelations most nights in between.

It’s where Tom Endres used to row surreptitiously across the river when he was a cadet at West Point and visits still, where Wendy Bounds wandered in one day two months after 9/11 and a few years later emerged with a book called “Little Chapel on the River,” where the cast of characters over the years has included Andy the opera singing bartender, Lou-Lou the dog and Fionnuala the swan.

And most of all, from the moment an Irish immigrant named Jim Guinan opened the place by the railroad tracks in 1959 with $316, it’s been where the Guinan family has managed to defy time and space. It’s where Jim lives above the store when’s he’s not ministering to the flock, where his son John picked up the mantle to keep it going three years back, where the off-center shamrock still graces the fireplace and the cash register is the 1927 Federal that’s as big as a boat anchor. At Guinan’s it may not be 1959, but it sure ain’t 2007.

So while the announcement in The Putnam County News & Recorder last week didn’t come as a complete surprise, it still came as a shock, as jarring as a world where cows flew, horses sang “Danny Boy” and there was no Guinan’s on Garrison’s Landing.

“To all our valued customers and friends,” began the letter from John Guinan. “It becomes my sad duty to inform you that after 48 years of business we will be closing our doors for good.” There was a reference to health issues that made it impossible to stay open, and there were thanks for everyone’s love and support. “January 31 will be our last day — we will be open all day. Please join us for a final beer and toast to family and good friends.”

In truth, this was not the first time Guinan’s had glimpsed its own demise. Two years after it opened, Jim Guinan almost packed it in until a new lease arrangement made it feasible to continue. Then after Jim’s wife, Peg, died in 1988, as his diabetes got worse in the 1990s, as people wondered who these days could run a country store that caters to both the commuters catching the 4:44 a.m. train and the drinkers at night, it was as if the shadow of mortality was always just around the corner. For those who philosophized about Guinan’s — which meant almost everyone who walked in the door — it sank in that Guinan’s was living on borrowed time.

And then the philosophical became real. Last fall, John Guinan, the rock who kept the thing going, felt a numbness on his left side when driving to open the store one morning. He suffered a seizure on the way to the hospital and was found to have a malignant brain tumor. His ad was simply a recognition of the obvious — without John to run it, there could be no Guinan’s.

But then, if this were a wholly rational world, there probably couldn’t be a Guinan’s anyway. And as the word leaked out, even before the ad ran, a group of regulars gathered at the bar to figure out a way to cheat time once more. The first thought was they needed Guinan’s for what it meant to them — the coffee for the commuters, the beer and companionship at night. The second was they needed Guinan’s for what it meant for the family, especially Jim Guinan, now 81, who had lived there since 1959.

IDEAS were kicked around about how people could help. Among others, Mary Ellen Yannitelli, whose husband’s family once owned the place before the Guinans, said she could work a day a week and do whatever was needed.

On Monday, two days before it was supposed to close, John Guinan’s sister Margaret, a police detective, agreed to run it for another year and his daughter, Kelly, agreed to help. “It helps in lots of ways,” said John Guinan. “It gives Dad a place to live. It gives the customers a way to enjoy the store for a time frame longer. It’s another way friendship, human duct tape as Wendy put it, keeps this place going.”

Maybe you can’t live on borrowed time forever. But the next full moon is Friday. The following Thursday, there will be Irish music at Guinan’s. The beer will flow. The walls will shake. The green shamrock will shimmer over the Hudson. And time will have to wait another year — a good bit more if the faithful are lucky — to get paid back.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

A version of this article appeared in print on January 31, 2007, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: An Irish Bar, Defying Time, Manages to Cheat It.